The Blow

Paper Television

Khaela Maricich, now joined by YACHT's Jona Bechtolt, crafts a wickedly generous and clever record of not-quite love songs and elaborately metaphored stabs at the rituals of simple human communication.

It's late September, and Khaela Maricich is in New York City, playing the first of two local shows in support of her new record, Paper Television. Maricich is in the middle of "Pardon Me"; she's just sung the part that goes and I lay, before youuu and now entering the speakers is the bridge, what the liner notes call a "melodic interpretation of the first verse"-- a plastic-horn synth line, honking bass, G-Funk winding organ, and handclaps. Maricich is alone onstage-- her bandmate, YACHT's Jona Bechtolt, is on a tour of his own-- and there's no singing during this part, no instruments for her to play. With a visible gulp, she steels herself; and as the bridge hits she takes off across stage, shaking her shoulders, bouncing up and down, four feet up onstage from the crowd and totally by herself. You feel awful for her and touched at the same time.

It wasn't always this way: Prior to Paper Television, the Blow was a solo operation, and Maricich alone could never make tracks like these, crowded with wobbly, stuttering snares and claps, keyboarded flutes, horns, and crowd noise interpolations. Credit for these belongs to Bechtolt-- a cracked-laptop wizard who, as YACHT, has been pulling a similar beats/karaoke/dance routine live for three or four years. His production is a brilliant and versatile grab bag of popular culture, equal parts Missy Elliott-style chart rap and Yaz'n'Soft Cell-like new wave keyboard pop, all shook up and spit out sideways.

Now and then, Maricich and Bechtolt run through public airwaves and pop music like what's there is theirs for the taking. It didn't always feel like they were giving back: They got to be artistes, artists were source material, and we the incidental audience. Not so here: "We have a new record, and we didn't rip anything off to do it-- we swear." This is how Khaela Maricich decides to introduce the one song she didn't really write-- her take on a Police jam-- back in New York.

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The communal vibe is heavy in the club, and it's to celebrate Paper Television, a wickedly generous and clever record of not-quite love songs and elaborately metaphored stabs at the rituals of simple human communication. At the show, as on the record, love is compared to gold, consumer goods, god, even the Louvre. Getting busy is a business negotiation or a threesome with a guy and the greater universe. Sometimes lovers are vigilantes and rebels; other times they're lawyers reluctantly hashing out contracts. "You should treat us good," admonishes Maricich. "If you do that then you know we're gonna, unh, unh, unhhh share more of our goods with you." Or on "Parentheses": "Some philosophies fuel a belief in the self/ Constructed to keep one's goods on one's own shelf."

Paper Television wants them off the shelf and shared. "Parentheses" sets love in a supermarket and helps its lovesick protagonist through the store, with a heartbreaking verse: "If something in the deli aisle/ Makes you cry/ You know I'll put my arm around you/ And I'll walk you outside." On "Pardon Me", Maricich plays it cool, asking, "Pardon me, but wasn't that your heart?" before betraying herself and stepping up her vocal one strained register per confessional word: "I believe. A heart. Is made. To feel. The things. That lay in front of it," lashed at the end by a snare snap and that forbidding dance bridge.

Bechtolt can play along, laying back with cowbells and snaps and gauzy synth swells, but he also stretches Maricich in new directions. "The Big U" is remarkably apt Neptunes minimalism, a "Drop It Like It's Hot" for the emo set-- throbbing, whispery bass, clucks and clicks, Maricich muttering and saying "yeah" over the quiet funk. On "The Long List of Girls", Bechtolt breaks out drumline snare rolls and stick clicks-- too ambitiously, as Maricich has to almost rap to keep up-- but it's beyond familiar, and totally unexpected.

The story Maricich is telling-- she's got a heart that doesn't want to go out and get hurt in the world, but she's trying to talk her heart into going out anyway-- is wildly endearing. Her love, on "Fists Up", is both a fortress and a museum (the Louvre, to be exact), and she keeps trying to let it out but her man demands proof, which makes it go hide again; on "Eat Your Heart Up", she asks her reluctant heart "Oh my heart, where would we start? What would we do? And what would people think if they saw me out with you?" We have though, and the pair look just about perfect.